The adoption of Salesforce has surged significantly in recent years, driven by the platform's increasing capabilities and robust features that cater to a wide range of business needs.
However, as more organizations integrate Salesforce into their operations, they often encounter challenges related to the disconnect between Salesforce CRM and their existing on-premises or cloud-based ERP systems, which are frequently powered by Oracle. This disconnect can lead to inconsistencies and visibility issues, particularly in the realm of customer data access and management. These gaps can hinder the seamless flow of information across departments, resulting in fragmented data that complicates decision-making processes and diminishes the overall efficiency of business operations.
As companies strive to maintain a competitive edge, addressing these integration challenges becomes crucial to unlocking the full potential of their Salesforce and ERP investments, ensuring that customer data is not only accessible but also reliable and actionable across the entire organization.
When you integrate your ERP and CRM, you demolish inefficient data silos and visibility gaps created by teams in different departments using different tools. This provides a myriad of business benefits, but here are our top five:
As we mentioned earlier, the integration process can differ depending on which specific customer data is deemed essential for your operational and sales teams. However, in a broad sense, the integration typically follows a structured four-step approach. This methodical process ensures that the integration is tailored to meet the unique needs of your organization, allowing for a seamless and efficient connection between your systems.
By focusing on the critical data points that drive your business, this approach facilitates a more cohesive and effective integration, ultimately enhancing the overall functionality and performance of your Salesforce CRM and Oracle ERP systems.
The first step is to figure out which “objects” or data points you want to extract from each system and what those will be called and how they will be presented in the other system.
In some situations, the object titles may line up, but often, you will need to establish transformation rules so each system can make sense of the data it receives from the other. For example, the data generally referred to as “Sales Order” in Oracle e-Business Suite is simply known as “Order” in Salesforce. Your integration needs to take that equivalency and the transformation necessary to present that same data point in either system into consideration.
Once you’ve mapped fields between the two environments and your backend ERP is established, the next step is to make a secure connection between Salesforce and your cloud-based or on-premises ERP. You need to ensure the two-way flow of data is smooth, so that both core Salesforce users (like your sales team) and core ERP users (like your warehouse/logistics team) get the full experience and value.
With your tunnel in place, you need to create connection adaptors in order to carry out the actual integration between the Salesforce and Oracle environments. These adaptors serve as the base for all future integrations.
There are many small, specific tasks that your integrated system will need to carry out to provide your organization a single source of truth. For example, attached files will need to be converted in terms of format and customer and financial data points will need to be extrapolated for reporting, billing, etc.
By leveraging microservices architecture, you can create a core group of these essential functions and use them as building blocks to construct your integrated environment rapidly without over-investing time or capital.
… From there, the possibilities are endless! You can extend customer data to Salesforce Experience Cloud to create a secure, omnichannel customer portal, challenge your sales team to increase their productivity by reducing office inefficiencies, or just sit back and watch what happens when you have a truly enterprise-wide approach to customer data and relationship management.
If you’re looking to connect an on-premises or cloud-based Oracle ERP with your Salesforce CRM or Salesforce Experience Cloud, rSTAR can help! We are an Oracle Platinum Partner who knows ERP Cloud and e-Business Suite like the back of our hands and a Salesforce Partner who specializes in using Experience Cloud to present data in powerful and innovative ways.
We can help you create a vision of your new environment, map your integration, and even build the tunnel and design your microservices. Let’s start a conversation about how you can improve your team’s ability to serve customers and generate business using Salesforce and Oracle.
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